


i’m lucky when you came along i had a chance to take.

by LLReid



Series: the ghosts of girlfriends past. [3]
Category: Bloodbound (Visual Novels), Queen B (Visual Novel)
Genre: Anastasia’s Backstory, Canon LGBTQ Character, F/F, First Love, Fluff, Immigration & Emigration, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Female Character, Love at First Sight, Romantic Fluff, Teacher-Student Relationship, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, first I love you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:28:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27274171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LLReid/pseuds/LLReid
Summary: Inspired by; This Is Us by Noah Cyrus & Jimmie Allen.~~~~~“It’s wonderful,” she interjected. “You’re wonderful. That mind is just one of the many things I love about you—“ she cut herself off the moment the words left her mouth. She hadn’t meant to say them. Really, she hadn’t. “I—““Do you mean that?,” Anastasia asked quietly.She let out a shaky breath that floated in front of her face for a moment before disappearing into the chilly air and she nodded tightly. “You know I do.”Anastasia’s breath audibly caught in the back of her throat and she stared at her, genuinely driven speechless as she waited for her to either elaborate or for her fight or flight response to kick in. Ina stared back at her and it hit her. It hit her that Anastasia really was so utterly oblivious and unassuming of other people’s emotions that she’d truly had no idea that she’d fallen in love with her that night in the Speakeasy.“Tell me you knew,” she whispered, half laughing.
Relationships: Ina Kingsley/Anastasia Swann, Ina Kingsley/Original Character
Series: the ghosts of girlfriends past. [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1974595
Comments: 2
Kudos: 29





	i’m lucky when you came along i had a chance to take.

“You do realise we’ve been wandering the city all night.” Anastasia’s laugh was quiet and musical as they walked into Battery Park, having somehow made it there on foot from Belvoire’s campus on The Upper East Side without even noticing how far they’d gone until it was too late. The pinks and oranges of the early Winter sunrise was just beginning to paint the horizon, the quiet city just beginning to wake. 

Ina laughed softly and gave her hand a gentle squeeze. The ache in her feet didn’t bother her, nor did the cold November wind blowing in from The Atlantic, or the fact she was almost certainly old enough to know better than pulling an all-nighter. Not when she’d spent the past eight hours getting lost in Anastasia, talking to her about everything and anything that came to mind without ever running out of things to say. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Neither had I until...,” Anastasia trailed off and nodded towards Lady Liberty in the distance, her glacial eyes widening in awe. “You know, I’ve never actually seen her before.”

“You what?” She blinked. “You’ve lived here since you graduated high school at seventeen... how is that even possible? Most people come straight here when they arrive in Manhattan for the first time.”

“I’ve been too busy since moving here to do the whole tourist thing,” the redhead shrugged. “Even when you’re here on a student visa you have to do twice as much and contribute twice as much to society in order to survive. The fact that I’m actually thriving more than most people my age who were born here doesn’t actually leave a lot of time for day trips, unfortunately.”

They took a seat on one of the benches that faced out onto the water and Ina wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Well I’m glad I could be the one to see her with you for the first time.”

A small smile twitched at the corners of Anastasia’s lips but she didn’t take her eyes off of the statue in the distance. When she spoke, her voice was so gentle it barely even qualified as a whisper, “It’s amazing how many people like me were greeted by this sight when they first came here. You know, back when the city's steam-and-smoke-smudged harbours were the most extraordinary sight in the world for those of us wanting to make a better life for ourselves here. Back when she was still shiny copper and not all green at all.”

“My great grandmother arrived with her father and brother from Belfast in 1910 and the story has been passed down the Kingsley family since then. Apparently her father was amazed that it was not a president or a goddess or a revolutionary war hero who welcomed them to America. That it was just an ordinary woman lighting the way— a lady offering them the liberty to pursue their dreams if they had the courage to pursue them.”

Anastasia sighed happily. “And to think I was planning on moving to Paris straight out of high school... I can’t imagine missing out on all this.”

“You were planning on going to Paris?,” she asked.

“To study and work in fashion, yes. I don’t talk about it but I was a pretty successful high fashion child model from the time I was nine months old until around fourteen to help support my family. So I still have a lot of connections even though I didn’t grow tall enough to continue on the runways as an adult. I had a few opportunities lined up in Paris but they didn’t feel right... something was calling me here,” Anastasia said without offering any further explanation. She was never purposely vague or shady about anything, her mind just seemed to move so quickly from one thing to the other that she always tended to forget that her every thought wasn’t broadcast to the people she was talking to. “I guess it goes to show that you just never know where life will take you. You search for answers. You wonder what it all means. You stumble, and you soar. And, if you’re lucky, you make it to Manhattan for a while.”

Ina chuckled, making a mental not to enquire about the child modelling or what the opportunities she turned down were at a later date. “And what about after you graduate?”

“After I graduate?”

“Do you plan on staying for a while?,” she asked with bated breath. Anastasia was worldly beyond her years and savvy enough that she’d be able to make a cosmopolitan life straight out of a movie for herself in any major city in the world. Out of all of Ina’s students, she couldn’t think of another that she believed had so much potential... and that wasn’t because she had been dating her for a while. Anyone who spent five minutes with this young woman knew that she was special in a way that you couldn’t quite put your finger on. In a way that made you stop and pay attention to her because you just knew she was going to go on to do something great with her life. Something that people would remember her for. “You could go anywhere,” she continued. “Do you— I mean— Is there a reason you’d stay in New York?”

“Before I transferred from NYU to Belvoire, I would’ve said no to that question. After I let go of going to Paris, my plan became getting my degrees from an American university and then moving back home to Kazakhstan, not to be close to my family, but because I miss my home. I miss speaking my native tongue. I miss being immersed in my culture. My people. The scenery. I’ve lived away from Almaty since I was ten, you know. First at boarding school in England and now here.” She hummed and fell quiet for a long moment, her eyes still stuck to the horizon. “But... recently... I’ve fallen in love with New York in a way that I never expected that I would. The feeling of home and happiness is a complicated thing for me but I feel it here, stronger than I ever felt it in Almaty. I hope to be able to stay for a few years at least because there are many things I would miss if I went anywhere else— but with the immigration system here... well... you never know.”

Ina swallowed thickly and nodded her head. “I’ll do anything to help you, you know that?”

“I know,” Anastasia whispered, leaning her head on her shoulder. “At some points in my life I would still like to live elsewhere; Geneva would be a great place to be if I want to continue possibly working down the science track, Silicon Valley is great for tech, if I ever did want to dip my toes back into fashion either Milan or Paris would hold a lot of big opportunities for me, and I plan on retiring in either Utrecht or Copenhagen... but for right now New York feels like home.”

She kissed the crown of her head and focused her stare on the river, quietly amazed that she’d actually thought that far in advance. Most twenty-one years olds didn’t plan much further than what was going to happen beyond their immediate future, yet here Anastasia had planned much further than even Ina herself had considered. “You really are amazing.“

“Am I?”

“You’re an old soul,” she breathed, shaking her head. “You just— you speak about everything with so much certainty... but none of the naivety or arrogance you’d expect from someone your age. How do you do it?”

Anastasia took a deep breath and slowly exhaled it. “Do you really want to know?”

“I really, really do.”

“I was raised by people who spent every day wishing they were dead and by the age of ten I was doing the same thing,” she said. “I’ve known my own pain and I’ve witnessed it in others — and a lot of it, too much for someone my age some might say — and it reminded me that I am alive. It made me start thinking about my own mortality when most people my age were still oblivious to the passing of time, it made me realise how little time we all actually have to live our lives... to make something of ourselves. It made me start examining my soul — which, after all, most people are too afraid to completely surrender to anything bigger than themselves or change but yet that’s the very thing that makes them feel more miserable than any other thing. We literally make ourselves miserable by ignoring the things that would make us happy and spend our lives making other people rich and we just accept that as normal.” She paused for a long moment. “In some twisted way, my pain made me more aware of myself and helped me get out of the mindset where I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but weirdly essential way. It was a hard thing to learn as a child that I was separate from the world and that I always would be. That no one and nothing hurt along with my skinned knees or spells of depression, that my physical aches and mental pains were all my own and always would be. That my own happiness had to be my own responsibility. Even more terrible and terrifying, as I grew up and was left to my own devices in a foreign country, to learn that no person, no matter how much we love them or how much time they spend with us, can ever truly understand us. What they see when they look at us will always be different to what we see when we look in the mirror. Our own selves make us most unhappy, but that's exactly why most people are so anxious to lose themselves or examine themselves too closely, don't you think? They’re scared to lose that unhappiness, to really realise how fucked up this world is. They’re scared of how fragile happiness can be... and that’s the saddest thing in the world, in my opinion. Once you get past those mental barriers and accept those truths it’s actually surprisingly easy to see things differently than most people do.”

Ina’s jaw literally dropped and she sat there dumbfounded. She’d spoken with numerous highly awarded colleagues and spent hours-upon-hours pouring over numerous published works, trying to find the perfect way to sum up the human experience. It was a question that had baffled many great anthropologists from around the world for centuries, yet she’d never heard it summed up more eloquently.

“I don’t think you even realise what you just said,” she said, eventually remembering how words worked. “You just— You just keep dropping those casual displays of intelligence on me— I’m supposed to be your professor! I’m supposed to be the one blowing your mind!”

“You blow me away, baby,” Anastasia laughed lightly as she patted her hand. “Take all the time you need to geek out. I won’t judge.”

“I— I’m going to be stuck on that for weeks,” she stammered. “Keep going. Tell me more about how you— about how you’re you.”

Anastasia giggled quietly and turned her head so that her blue eyes were blazing up at her. If it were even more possible they were even more piercing in this light, balancing out the shades of flame in her hair glistening against the dawn. “You’re serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

“Well... I just tend to think about how life — regardless of whatever else it is or whatever else it can be — is always too short. Real life isn’t like the Twilight Sagas where we become immortal and have thousands of years to do good and become the best versions of ourselves. We get — what? — eight, nine decades if we’re really lucky... but most people get much less than that. Fate is cruel but maybe not always random. Nature — death — always wins in the end but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it and beat it to the punch, which I realised a long time ago is exactly what society has conditioned us all to do.” She paused, quietly searching her face to make sure she was following. “I won’t lie, I’m still not always glad to be here... but I want to immerse myself in everything life has to offer anyway: march straight through it, while keeping my eyes, my mind, and my heart open to as much as I can. Sometimes it's just about playing a poor hand well. And in the midst of the intrusive thoughts and the dying we all do everyday when we’re focusing on unimportant things like they’re matters of life and death, I just try to remember it’s a privilege to love and experience what death doesn’t touch.” She shrugged her shoulders and laughed nervously. “I don’t know. I mean... it’s probably silly—“

“It’s wonderful,” she interjected. “You’re wonderful. That mind is just one of the many things I love about you—“ she cut herself off the moment the words left her mouth. She hadn’t meant to say them. Really, she hadn’t. “I—“

“Do you mean that?,” Anastasia asked quietly.

She let out a shaky breath that floated in front of her face for a moment before disappearing into the chilly air and she nodded tightly. “You know I do.”

Anastasia’s breath audibly caught in the back of her throat and she stared at her, genuinely driven speechless as she waited for her to either elaborate or for her fight or flight response to kick in. Ina stared back at her and it hit her. It hit her that Anastasia really was so utterly oblivious and unassuming of other people’s emotions that she’d truly had no idea that she’d fallen in love with her that night in the Speakeasy.

“Tell me you knew,” she whispered, half laughing. Stay away from the ones you love too much, her grandmother had told her many times when she was a teenager. Those are the ones who would kill you. Sometimes, however, we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us. “Anastasia. Honey. Tell me you knew.”

They looked at each other. And it occurred to Ina that despite her own faults and despite Anastasia’s faults, which were both plentiful and spectacular, the reason she loved her the way she did and had felt so profoundly and peacefully happy around her from almost the moment she’d met her was that she was never afraid. Working in a place like Belvoire she didn’t meet many people who moved so freely through the world with such a vigorous love for it and at the same time was such an unapologetic oddball. She genuinely wasn’t sure there were many people like her anywhere in the world.

Anastasia’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again, then closed again. This was the first time she’d ever seen her speechless. When she spoke, she spoke so quickly that she fumbled her words together and hardly took a breath between them, “I might try to be very self aware but I spend so much energy analysing myself that I’m often completely oblivious to people’s feelings towards me unless it’s spelled out. Laymen’s terms would be preferable. It’s a very real problem and I— It’s a running joke between my friends that I’m oblivious to many things— Very oblivious! Extremely oblivious! To many, many things—“

She shut her up with a kiss and couldn’t help but start laughing at how flustered she was all of a sudden. It lessened the gay panic threatening to kill her immensely to know that she had also descended into the age old Gay Panic Mode that every queer woman in the world was only too familiar with. There was literally no way to backtrack. She supposed at one time in her life she might have had any number of stories to fill the silence, but now there was no other. There was only one story she had to be able to tell.

She took a deep breath. Twenty seconds of courage, she reminded herself. Sometimes twenty seconds of courage could change your entire life for the better. Anastasia deserved to know the truth or every new thing — everything Ina did for the rest of her life — would only separate them more and more: days she would no longer be a part of, an ever-growing distance that would appear between them if the truth remained a silly, unspoken thing. Every single day for the rest of her life, she would only be further away... and she would regret not telling her.

“Well allow me to spell it out for you in the simplest of terms,” she said, caressing her cheek. “I don’t normally make a habit of walking the length of the city in the dead of night before a full day of lectures. I don’t lose track of time with anyone else the way I do with you. I don’t— Nobody brings me as much happiness as you do or understands me like you can, and I don’t think anyone ever has. You’re very, very special to me... and I’ve been in love with you since the moment I first saw you.”

“Ina,” Anastasia whispered, her eyes widening. “Do you remember I said something to you in Russian after we woke up in Martha’s Vineyard?”

She nodded. “And you told me that one day you would tell me what it meant...”

“Ya lyublyu tebya bol’she vsego na svete.” She kissed her lips. “It means I love you more than anything in the world.”

~ fin.


End file.
